A reading speed test measures words per minute on unfamiliar prose. This one uses a passage written for the purpose rather than a famous excerpt, so nobody has an advantage from having read it before, and it asks three comprehension questions afterwards, because a words-per-minute figure with no comprehension check attached is a measure of how fast you can move your eyes.
Read at your normal pace. Do not try to go fast; the number is more useful if it is honest.
The test
The passage is about 400 words. The timer starts when you press begin and stops when you press finished.
Somewhere between the first stone tool and this morning's headlines sit three hundred thousand years of people doing things worth knowing about, and almost none of it reaches us in the order it happened. History arrives instead as a set of disconnected scenes: a pharaoh, a plague, a revolution, a moon landing. The scenes are vivid and the connections between them are missing, which is why most people can name a dozen historical events and place perhaps three of them correctly against each other.
The same problem afflicts reading itself. A person who reads thirty books a year and remembers four of them has not been reading badly. They have been reading without a structure, which is a different failure and a more fixable one. The mind holds on to what it can attach to something else, and a fact with nothing to attach to slides off within a fortnight, no matter how interesting it was at the time.
This is the argument for reading slowly and in small portions, and it is not a romantic one. A page a day, returned to at the same hour, builds a scaffold that later pages can hang from. A weekend spent devouring four hundred pages builds an impression, and impressions fade. The difference shows up not in the week after reading but in the year after, when one person can still use what they read and the other can only report having enjoyed it.
None of which means speed is worthless. Reading quickly is genuinely useful for the large fraction of text that exists to be skimmed: reports, briefings, most journalism, most of the internet. The skill worth having is not reading fast but knowing which of the two modes a given page deserves, and being willing to switch. A contract and a poem require opposite treatment, and the reader who applies one speed to everything is doing at least half of their reading wrong.
The measurement below tells you one small thing: how quickly your eyes and your comprehension move together through unfamiliar prose at a comfortable pace. It does not tell you whether you are a good reader. Good readers routinely score in the middle of the range, because they slow down when a sentence deserves it, which is precisely the behaviour a speed test punishes.
Timer stopped. Three questions, then your result.
1. According to the passage, why do most facts slide off within a fortnight?
2. What does the passage say the genuinely useful skill is?
3. Why do good readers often score in the middle of a speed test?
What the number means
Typical adult reading speed on ordinary prose is somewhere around 200 to 250 words per minute with good comprehension. Skilled readers of dense material often sit lower, because dense material should be read slower. Above roughly 400 words per minute on unfamiliar text, comprehension usually starts paying for the speed, and above about 600 what is happening is skimming, which is a legitimate technique and a different one.
The claims you sometimes see for 1,000 or 2,000 words per minute with full comprehension do not survive testing. The eye has to fixate to resolve text, fixations take time, and the arithmetic runs out long before those numbers. What speed-reading courses reliably teach is subvocalisation control and better skimming, both genuinely useful, neither magic.
What to do with it
Very little, honestly. Reading speed is a weak predictor of how much a person gets out of a year of reading, and an obsession with it produces the specific failure of finishing books quickly and retaining nothing. The better lever is structure: fixed time, small portions, something to attach the new material to. Our guide to starting a daily reading habit covers the mechanics, and how to remember what you read is the one to read if the retention half is your actual complaint.
If you would rather test what to read than how fast, the 60-second book quiz ends in one recommendation rather than a list.
Common questions
What is a good reading speed?
Around 200 to 250 words per minute on ordinary prose with solid comprehension is typical for adults. Skilled readers of dense material often read slower on purpose, because dense material deserves it. Speed alone is a weak measure of reading ability.
How is reading speed measured?
Words divided by minutes. This test times how long you take over a passage of roughly 400 words, then multiplies the raw figure by your comprehension score, because a words-per-minute number with no comprehension check measures eye movement rather than reading.
Is it possible to read 1,000 words a minute?
Not with full comprehension. The eye must fixate to resolve text and fixations take time, so the arithmetic runs out well below that. Speed-reading courses reliably teach subvocalisation control and better skimming, both useful and neither magical.
Should I try to read faster?
Usually not. Reading speed predicts very little about what a year of reading leaves you with, and chasing it produces the specific failure of finishing books and retaining nothing. Structure and regularity are the stronger levers.
Does this test store my results?
No. Everything runs in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere, and there is no sign-up. Refreshing the page discards the result.